As I said, GPS is used, but just to save a little fuel and make arrival times a little more predictable. When GPS goes wonky, as determined by continuous comparison to the real avionics, it gets turned off.
Airplanes will most likely carry both GPS and Galileo receivers.... To have two satellite systems can only increase safety.
Hardly. The number of subsystem interactions that have to be correct increases geometrically with added subsystems.
In any event, commercial airlines do not now, and will not ever, rely on satellite navigation. Satellites are simply too vulnerable to high energy events: nuclear bombs, gamma ray bursts, somebody throwing 20 tonnes of sand into orbit, and so forth. Airplanes primarily navigate by dead reckoning and visual observation, and secondarily by terrestrial radio. Satellite guidance is just there to make travel a tiny fraction more efficient.
But why include the cost to "make damn sure he didn't do anything more serious and insidious"?
Because he was a former head of security who had essentially put backdoors in the security systems, then later used them for sabotage out of pure spite. At that point, you cannot trust his word that he only misused a single account. Diligent recovery involves scrubbing all the security systems down to the bare metal: reinstalling all software, cancelling and replacing access cards, changing PINs and passwords, replacing physical locks and reissuing keys, auditing the available logs, interviewing key people, and so forth.
Note too that this site (I think) was an Aventis Pharmaceutical manufacturing plant, watched closely by the bastards at the FDA. Basic diligence requires that the investigators establish to high probability (beyond any reasonable doubt?) that the sabotage did not extend to plant operations. Recalling all product made during the period of sabotage could easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars, with hundreds of millions more in lost sales from bad publicity, so IBM was right to investigate thoroughly.
I cannot believe the guy would contest the decision. He got little more than a slap on the wrist as a prison sentence. IBM was honest and fair, not running up huge bills the way consultants are wont to do, nor making the damage seem scarier than it was. He should thank his lucky stars.
And although this is *not* public knowledge this is also why China has requested Microsoft's help in replacing the effected portions of Windows
If by affected portions you mean network and filesystem encryption then, yeah, I believe the ChiComs would want it ripped out. And as we have recently seen, Microsoft is perfectly willing to bend over backwards for them. (Or forwards for that matter. Heh.)
The smaller each pixel gets, the less photo-generated electrons will be generated in that pixel from the incident light. If your analog chain can keep track of these electrons, it essentially does become a signal to noise problem.
Piffle. You simply have to stick it in liquid nitrogen, and use superconductive ADCs.;-)
Any problem can be solved with enough liquid nitrogen.
So if you counteract this, your nerves communicate less. Sounds like a tradeoff between higher mental capacity resulting in increased likelihood of nerve damage -vs- lower mental capacity but you get to use your brain longer.
The article is about preventing the damage caused by glutamate, not changing its levels. Besides which, IIRC a big part of glutamate toxicity is caused by failure of the pumps that suck it away from neurons. A drug that kept those working would simply keep the brain working normally (although that in itself might be damaging, if what the neurons need is rest and relaxation).
Moreover, Moore's Law does not apply to the sensors used in digital cameras because they are essentially A/D converters. It will be very difficult to increase their resolution much further without introducing unacceptably high levels of noise.
It does not apply, but the reason is that to get higher resolution, the image sensor size has to increase, which increases the probability that the sensor will be ruined by a defect. Doubling one dimension of the sensor quadruples the defect rate. (You can't just shrink the pixels for two reasons. Firstly because they are already creeping up on the wavelength of the light they are measuring. Secondly because the dead zone between pixels is of fixed size, so the smaller the pixels get, the more light gets thrown away in the dead zones.)
The jury is out on the existance of supermassive holes at all galactic centers (partly due to obvious impossibility of direct detection).
I disagree. The orbits of stars that get very close (while moving very fast!) to our galaxy's central mass have been directly observed, as shown on this page, which includes an amazing movie of stars whipping around the central mass. Likewise, we have observed strong x-ray variability of that region on a time scale of hours, implying a source no larger in size a few light-hours. That pretty much proves it's a black hole.
Above the only stronger evidence would be to watch it eclipse a star. Unfortunately the necessary arrangement of star, black hole, and US are unlikely to occur.
This is absolutely false. I develop a wide range of applications using both VS.NET and VC++ and I don't have to run any of them as administrator with one exception: there is no way to debug an ASP.NET 1.0/1.1 application without admin privs.
It may well have changed since I gave up and wrote the platform off as a total joke. What I remember is that you could try to run with lower privileges, but it would occassionally blow up for the most obscure reasons.
Except only a fool would debug an application this way. One can attach the debugger running as a high privs users to an application running as a low privs user, or even running in another logged in session.
There is a big gap between possible and convenient, especially when you have to do something over and over and over all day long, week after week, for some inane accounting app. For Microsoft to have made the default automatic behavior insecure is to choose insecurity everywhere.
The primary cause of Windows applications run running properly under low rights scenarios is poor guidelines and a lack of best practices documents from Microsoft early in the Windows lifecycle.
I remember seeing guidelines that told you how to do it right, and there existed apps that did it right. The problem for the larger developer community was that you had to bend over backwards to test compliance with the guidelines, since the tools made it so hard to work at the proper privilege level.
This, combined with the fact that Windows shipped with the default accounts being admins, created an environment of lazy programming which is now very difficult to fix.
And don't forget the Windows 95/98/ME series. Students, hobbyists, and small developers spent half a decade chained to that pile of crap.
At any rate, I love how my previous post is now flamebait. Oh well... that's Slashdot for ya.
And my flaming rant is now "insightful". I feel so... dirty.
Shitty programmers with little or no Q/A, and a huge festering code base which is continually patched together with duck tape to keep it going
Why isn't this drivel modded as flamebait?
Because it's true.
If you have even a shallow knowledge of Microsoft's engineering practices you would know that their Q/A is probably the most intensive that any software company has on the planet, and it's getting more intensive every day. Want an example? The ASP.NET team had 505,000 test scenarios for ASP.NET 2.0 that it had to pass 100% before they would lock it down as RTM.
We're not talking about one bleeding-edge product from one particular team, but rather the tens (hundreds?) of millions of lines of code haphazardly thrown together over the past few decades. It is claimed that the present flaw is in an obsolete interface (the SETABORTPROC GDI escape) provided for compatibility with ancient programs designed for DOS/Win16.
This problem is an extremely difficult one to solve, and a lot of it has to do with Microsoft's failure to produce specs and guidelines from the start that let ISVs know what they needed to do to make sure software ran as non-admin.
No. The sole and exclusive cause is that IDE (compiler and friends) has to be run as Administrator, because Microsoft is too lazy to fix even a single application. This is despite having solid gold opportunities when it was rewritten from scratch three times*, and substantially redesigned several more times.
This is the cause for a simple reason: Imagine you're a programmer making an app that runs properly as a less-privileged user. You do a little developing. You log out. You log back in as a less-privileged user. You test the app, using printf as the main debugging tool. You log out. You log back in. You restart the IDE and get everything back like it was. You do a little developing. And so forth. It's a waking nightmare of the type formerly encountered only in H.P. Lovecraft stories.
Microsoft's tools punish you for trying to do the right thing, because they want bad software so the customers expect to be on an upgrade treadmill.
*The original total rewrite of the C-language tools, the Java toolset, and the CLR toolset.
The security model in Windows is actually more extensive than the security model in most flavors of Unix, including Linux.
Indeed. If only Bill Gates had put sane people like Dave Cutler (NT kernel chief architect) in charge of every major project, instead of whoring out the codebase in a mad dash to squash Netscape and Sun. It's one thing for a tiny company barely staying afloat to cut standards, and entirely another for a rich company with billion dollar piles of cash lying about. The former is understandable, the latter is recklessness bordering on malice.
If I'm correctly understanding everything I've read so far, you need to actually click and open the.jpg attachment in order for the exploit to work, so no... you shouldn't be infected by just leaving your computer on.
I have read suggestions that certain searching services (Google Desktop?) can activate the payload when they index the file.
There are way too many US colleges that routinely violate the privacy of their students and expose them to identity theft...
Stop being a liar and apologist for the credit card companies. Your SSN is just one of your many legal aliases, used so that data managers can tell all the John Smiths apart. That's it. It is not a cryptographic secret used for authentication.
Nor is there any such thing as identity "theft". Identity is a mental concept. I can no more steal your identity than I can steal the color of your hair.
The problems you are referring to are not caused by someone carelessly publishing your SSN, nor by the person who claims your SSN is theirs. They result from the incompetence of lenders who promiscuously throw wads of money at nearly anybody who asks for it, without using even a single subatomic particle of due diligence, and then harrass whoever is handy for payment.
Repeat after me: There is no such thing as identity theft. There is such a thing as a false dunning letter. There is such a thing as actionable false prosecution.
Why did he have to provide his "name, address, phone number and Social Security number"... to read a book?
Because he also wanted one library to pay for someone to find the book and ship it out, and he wanted his library to pay for someone to receive it and notify him when it arrived. The SSN is so they can track him down for payment and returning the book; any government ID number would have worked.
AFAIK, most of them are water based. Water vapor carries heat from the hot end to the cool end, where it condenses and a wick carries it back. All the air is pumped out so that the water vapor travels rapidly. Water is used because it takes a huge amount of heat to evaporate, more than most common fluids, and remains liquid over a wide temperature range. Oh, and it's nontoxic and cheap, which makes manufacturing dirt cheap.
Most people don't know this, but 'Engineer' is not some phrase you can toss around or apply as desired.
It is in Texas, where this nonsense was been repealed.
In every state in the USA (and pretty much every other democratic nation), a Professional Engineer has to sign his (or her) name to every design before it can be sold and/or built.
Which actually happens about 0.01% of the time. If the failure of the design won't turn somebody into a nasty smear or splatter, the law is universally ignored. With no consequences to the public. Welcome to the real world.
The practice has really only survived because Engineers, in general, don't get all pissy about people abusing their official/professional title.
It has survived because prosecuting it would bring the wrath of the state legislature crashing down. As it did in Texas, when it was discovered that companies were being driven out of business by a state board dumb enough to believe their own pieces of paper, a state board who said with a straight face that the inventor of the integrated circuit was definitely not an engineer.
The law was written to allow only competent, licenced individuals to make decisions that can have lethal consequences.
Have you actually read some of these laws? Like the one in my jurisdiction that requires not merely that the P.E. have a bachelors degree, but that it must come from an institution where every technical professor also has a PE (I.e., no institution on Earth grants qualifying degrees.)
Or the ones that define engineering so broadly that telling someone that two inches of styrofoam out to keep their six pack cool all day is a regulated act of engineering. So broadly that all radio hams must be PEs.
The number of cases where it's required to be a licenced EE are currently quite small; the largest one is to be an expert witness in a court of law.
Wrong. The letter of the law requires all design threats to property to be licensed. Not just significant threats, all threats no matter how tiny. Every electronic device incorporating a totem-pole output must be approved by a PE (because the device will destroy itself if the upper and lower switches are turned on at the same time). That the device costs $0.08 and makes a light blink in a novelty toy powered by a AAA battery does not matter. It is Regulated Engineering and by god must be controlled.
'Software Engineer' is almost laughable, though (in the sense of licensing Software Engineers);...
Because writing aircraft fly-by-wire firmware and writing Hollywood graphics rendering software are both software engineering. Both require tremendous technical knowledge, the techniques for getting correct results are well established, and billions of dollars depend on each. Yet the required quality is drastically different. One must never fail, while it's OK if the other needs a full-time babysitter.
Licensure on the basis of knowledge, education, or task will always fail. Everyone will ingore it, and any engineering board foolish enough to try to enforce its regulations will be sternly corrected by their state legislature. The rational approach would be to draw up a list of particular types of designs that are regulated. E.g., airplanes, custom architecture, outdoor power lines, tanks operated above a pressure of N psi, and so forth.
Until it's possible to say 'this program failed because of this piece of code, written by Joe Schmuch, and he is liable for damages because of his negligence. He's licenced here, lives there, go arrest him and bring him to justice for his crime.' -- don't expect to see a 'real' Software Engineer.
And what if you could bring a particular software engineer to justice
Probably the company's estimate of its fair market value (cash value of assets + expected income - debts - expected expenses +/- other arcane accounting thingies).
All biofuels are plagued by the same production inefficiencies, since photosynthesis itself is less than 1% efficient (Solar irradiance at a generous max of 1000W/M^2 would leave you needing a few dozen acres per tiny car).
I thought photosynthesis was actually ~5% efficient. Anyway, assume 1.25% efficiency because much energy goes to tissues other than oil, 6 hours/day of sunlight, and a 180 day growing season. That's ~50 MJ/m^2/year of captured energy. A that car requires 37 kW (50 horsepower) for one hour a day needs ~50 GJ/year. Obviously you'd need 1000 m^2/car/year = 0.25 acres/car/year. Use a factor of four to account for various losses and that's 1 acre/car/year. Hardly dozens of acres per tiny car.
Can that be right? One acre is barely enough for a horse. Either I slipped a decimal point or horses are really inefficient.
The real problem with biofuels is not efficiency. It is chemical conversion. Getting the molecules into the proper shape at low cost will take a lot of clever chemistry that hasn't been done yet. The "breakthrough" under discussion is one piece of the puzzle.
What aquifer underlies the region in which you live? What has happened to that aquifer over the last 50 years? Is it being drawn down? Is it being polluted? Do you have any idea? Do you actually think that's a municipal-level issue.
Yes. Cities directly purchase many resources. Electricity, water, fuel oil, natural gas, fines for dirty air, diesel, you name it. Competent city managers are well aware of long-range resource limitations and cost projections, and make their decisions accordingly. They don't expect the Resource Fairy to wave her wand and give them an everlasting fount of water. (The town where I live built a 44 mile pipeline to a lake, presumably because its water is cheaper to purify.)
There are serious, underpublicized water shortages all over America.... Some have to do with depletion of deep resouces. You won't find out about it in the blogosphere.
And that 0.27% could be enough to alter the delicate balance that existed before we began adding our share.
What delicate balance? The Sun is known to be a variable star, and the evidence clearly indicates that the climate undergoes gigantic natural variations. Dry deserts, ice deserts, and praries, wetlands, permafrost, and so forth sweep back and forth across the surface of the Earth. Greenland got its name because, within recorded history, it had a moderate climate with lots of green growing things. There are rivers that within recorded history froze solid enough for heavy cargo to be carried across, that today never freeze over completely let alone thickly.
Don't think so? Check to see what the house edge on, say, blackjack or craps is. In a number of cases (it varies based on the exact rules the casino sets), less than 1%. Las Vegas keeps on growing though.
An ineffective analogy. Gambling profit and loss is a pure exponential process, with change limits not controlled by the process. However climate change is strongly limited by powerful restoring forces (radiation into space, reflection from clouds).
P.S. Mars is thought to be currently undergoing global warming. And I'm pretty sure NASA didn't do it.
In order to heat the water, the heating element has to heat up itself and transfer large amounts of heat to water passing around it. This means that the heating element has to get extremely hot compared to the initial water temp.
Or it has to have a very large surface area, easily accomplished with wires and fins. Reaching high surface temperatures is undesirable anyway, because minerals tend to precipitate from overheated water.
Slashdot Mirror
As I said, GPS is used, but just to save a little fuel and make arrival times a little more predictable. When GPS goes wonky, as determined by continuous comparison to the real avionics, it gets turned off.
In any event, commercial airlines do not now, and will not ever, rely on satellite navigation. Satellites are simply too vulnerable to high energy events: nuclear bombs, gamma ray bursts, somebody throwing 20 tonnes of sand into orbit, and so forth. Airplanes primarily navigate by dead reckoning and visual observation, and secondarily by terrestrial radio. Satellite guidance is just there to make travel a tiny fraction more efficient.
Note too that this site (I think) was an Aventis Pharmaceutical manufacturing plant, watched closely by the bastards at the FDA. Basic diligence requires that the investigators establish to high probability (beyond any reasonable doubt?) that the sabotage did not extend to plant operations. Recalling all product made during the period of sabotage could easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars, with hundreds of millions more in lost sales from bad publicity, so IBM was right to investigate thoroughly.
I cannot believe the guy would contest the decision. He got little more than a slap on the wrist as a prison sentence. IBM was honest and fair, not running up huge bills the way consultants are wont to do, nor making the damage seem scarier than it was. He should thank his lucky stars.
Any problem can be solved with enough liquid nitrogen.
Thanks. I read carelessly.
Above the only stronger evidence would be to watch it eclipse a star. Unfortunately the necessary arrangement of star, black hole, and US are unlikely to occur.
This is the cause for a simple reason: Imagine you're a programmer making an app that runs properly as a less-privileged user. You do a little developing. You log out. You log back in as a less-privileged user. You test the app, using printf as the main debugging tool. You log out. You log back in. You restart the IDE and get everything back like it was. You do a little developing. And so forth. It's a waking nightmare of the type formerly encountered only in H.P. Lovecraft stories.
Microsoft's tools punish you for trying to do the right thing, because they want bad software so the customers expect to be on an upgrade treadmill.
*The original total rewrite of the C-language tools, the Java toolset, and the CLR toolset.
Indeed. If only Bill Gates had put sane people like Dave Cutler (NT kernel chief architect) in charge of every major project, instead of whoring out the codebase in a mad dash to squash Netscape and Sun. It's one thing for a tiny company barely staying afloat to cut standards, and entirely another for a rich company with billion dollar piles of cash lying about. The former is understandable, the latter is recklessness bordering on malice.Nor is there any such thing as identity "theft". Identity is a mental concept. I can no more steal your identity than I can steal the color of your hair.
The problems you are referring to are not caused by someone carelessly publishing your SSN, nor by the person who claims your SSN is theirs. They result from the incompetence of lenders who promiscuously throw wads of money at nearly anybody who asks for it, without using even a single subatomic particle of due diligence, and then harrass whoever is handy for payment.
Repeat after me: There is no such thing as identity theft. There is such a thing as a false dunning letter. There is such a thing as actionable false prosecution.
AFAIK, most of them are water based. Water vapor carries heat from the hot end to the cool end, where it condenses and a wick carries it back. All the air is pumped out so that the water vapor travels rapidly. Water is used because it takes a huge amount of heat to evaporate, more than most common fluids, and remains liquid over a wide temperature range. Oh, and it's nontoxic and cheap, which makes manufacturing dirt cheap.
It is in Texas, where this nonsense was been repealed.
Which actually happens about 0.01% of the time. If the failure of the design won't turn somebody into a nasty smear or splatter, the law is universally ignored. With no consequences to the public. Welcome to the real world.
It has survived because prosecuting it would bring the wrath of the state legislature crashing down. As it did in Texas, when it was discovered that companies were being driven out of business by a state board dumb enough to believe their own pieces of paper, a state board who said with a straight face that the inventor of the integrated circuit was definitely not an engineer.
Have you actually read some of these laws? Like the one in my jurisdiction that requires not merely that the P.E. have a bachelors degree, but that it must come from an institution where every technical professor also has a PE (I.e., no institution on Earth grants qualifying degrees.)
Or the ones that define engineering so broadly that telling someone that two inches of styrofoam out to keep their six pack cool all day is a regulated act of engineering. So broadly that all radio hams must be PEs.
Wrong. The letter of the law requires all design threats to property to be licensed. Not just significant threats, all threats no matter how tiny. Every electronic device incorporating a totem-pole output must be approved by a PE (because the device will destroy itself if the upper and lower switches are turned on at the same time). That the device costs $0.08 and makes a light blink in a novelty toy powered by a AAA battery does not matter. It is Regulated Engineering and by god must be controlled.
Because writing aircraft fly-by-wire firmware and writing Hollywood graphics rendering software are both software engineering. Both require tremendous technical knowledge, the techniques for getting correct results are well established, and billions of dollars depend on each. Yet the required quality is drastically different. One must never fail, while it's OK if the other needs a full-time babysitter.
Licensure on the basis of knowledge, education, or task will always fail. Everyone will ingore it, and any engineering board foolish enough to try to enforce its regulations will be sternly corrected by their state legislature. The rational approach would be to draw up a list of particular types of designs that are regulated. E.g., airplanes, custom architecture, outdoor power lines, tanks operated above a pressure of N psi, and so forth.
And what if you could bring a particular software engineer to justice
Probably the company's estimate of its fair market value (cash value of assets + expected income - debts - expected expenses +/- other arcane accounting thingies).
Can that be right? One acre is barely enough for a horse. Either I slipped a decimal point or horses are really inefficient.
The real problem with biofuels is not efficiency. It is chemical conversion. Getting the molecules into the proper shape at low cost will take a lot of clever chemistry that hasn't been done yet. The "breakthrough" under discussion is one piece of the puzzle.
P.S. Mars is thought to be currently undergoing global warming. And I'm pretty sure NASA didn't do it.
And I'm helping him investigate E.T. My assignment is a detailed investigation of Drew Barrymore. <shiver>